


Out of Alcoves

by IWantToGoHome



Category: Uncategorized - Fandom
Genre: Folklore, Mythology - Freeform, Original Fiction, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:00:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25131280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IWantToGoHome/pseuds/IWantToGoHome
Summary: A figment of your imagination has entered the chat.
Kudos: 1





	Out of Alcoves

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't really fandom related, but it's an idea that I've had kicking around in my head for a while (driving me kind of insane lol). My plan is to sort of build a world based in meta fiction and channel aspects of folklore and mythology that strike my interest. I don't know if I'm going to stick with this one voice throughout the whole thing or if I'm going to switch around at some point, but I'm kind of just writing whatever comes to mind right now. You could say that this is inspired a bit by The Sandman comic series by Neil Gaiman and some of my favorite fanfictions that got lost to time based on the Thor movies. I hope you like it because this is the stuff I think about that I'm honestly too embarrassed to even talk about in therapy. I'm totally new to writing fiction so the first few chapters are probably going to be a bit short.

So, the thing most people don't realize about folklore, myth, or really any kind of shared dream you can imagine, is that pretty much every figure that features in a story at some point started out as a shapeshifter. I mean this in the sense that very few of us had any real form to begin with, more of a basic outline or a compilation of raw ingredients. If you want to go back even further, we didn't really have any distinguishing characteristics that you would think to call "ingredients", but that's not really what I want to talk about now. I suppose you could say the same for most people anyway. I guess what I'm getting at is that when people started to tell stories about us that's when we really diversified and even then, near the beginning at least, it was really a matter of who specifically was telling the story. I think they were all pretty much tapping into the same areas of their brains when they dreamed of the beings they would consider monstrous since the characteristics of these types tend to overlap, the same goes for the divine. It seems like something strange must happen in the mind of a person for them to loop back around and lump these sorts of normally contradictory characteristics into the structure of the same being, but nonetheless this happens sometimes and can even be a popular style of conceiving us in some parts of the tangible world.

I've yet to fully understand it, but there's a tendency for people to link these figures that possess both appealing and unappealing qualities with the category "cosmic". Those bigger than me, or older than me by the standards of the dreamers, tell me that this is simply their society's way of coping with a dream they have very little control of and it happens every century or so for them when something new comes along. I believe them, but I think there's more to it than that, namely because it seems to happen to the largest ones just as often. I don't really understand how time works for the people that imagine us into form, but this implies that they somehow don't have control over things that they have already thought or experienced after their dreams reach a certain size. I don't think they "forget" us exactly, but they seem to let us slip back into the place we came from without the benefit of the fluidity that we had before they changed us. Anyway, I guess this brings me to my point; many of us are having a hard time coping with our newfound forms now that we've really started growing in them and, for what it's worth, I think we should jump on this new opportunity to open up about it.

I feel like I should disclose that I'm not really one of the figures that's been hit the hardest by the age of my story. I've been around in one shape or another since the storytellers first learned how to hold wool with wood and make sheets of it by pulling it over and under itself, but I hadn't really come of form until people started switching electrical currents on and off to mold and share their dreams instead. Like I said before, my issue is not with my age, as the dreamers would understand it, but with the spaces I inhabit and how frequently I seem to move between them now that I've taken shape in the way that I have. The bigger dreams that I run in the same circles with tell me that this kind of jumping through the temporal world happened to them as well just after they took form. They say that eventually they were able to spread out enough that it didn't bother them so much anymore, but most of them agree that they weren't pushed to cover nearly as much space so quickly. I'm a little scared. I'm not sure if or when I'll stabilize and I hope I'm not breaking some sort of unspoken taboo by addressing the storytellers directly about this.

Some of you might assume that I'm taking issue with technology, but I can assure you that couldn't be further from the truth. I'm actually pretty close with some of the figures that took on the meaning of technological progress. When the creation of a new tool features in a story I'm usually there in the details somewhere even though I don't recall ever having been the one making it yet. I don't know if I can explain this in a way that really translates, but when I say "I'm close" to some dream or figure or another I mean I am a part of them even though I am, at the same time, fundamentally my own thing just like they are. It's sort of icky to think about if you imagine us as anything but intangible ideas, but you get the point. We're connected by theme or language or role most of the time (though I don't quite have as much of a "role" as the dreams or figures I comprise). In the same vein, if in a story there's a trickster, or a dwarf, or a spinner, or a web I'm often not far. I wasn't there when you discovered symbols, but when you began combining them in order to share new ideas I felt some sort of a precursor to what I am now flicker alive.

However now there's code and there are sprawling systems of every kind for new sorts of travelers, and when you imagine a stranger whose face you can't see who knows these things better than they do the mundane world, you have attempted to create my avatar. You have put me on a bus or at the corner of a crosswalk and you have lit my face by a dim turquoise light and you have given me quick anxious hands. I don't believe that this design is the result of the tools that you've built, but I know that tools are used in the struggle for power that you've found yourself in for every generation now. I'm sorry you're here again. I think we can help each other.


End file.
